About Donald Lystra
Born in 1945, Donald Lystra was raised in the cities, towns, suburbs and countryside of Michigan. As a young man he worked as an auto plant worker, a door-to-door salesman, a dishwasher, a housepainter, and a shipyard engineer. He eventually settled into a career as a consulting electrical engineer, though in his fifties he began to write fiction in a serious way. His work has been widely praised for the strong emotion captured in its quiet understated prose. He is the recipient of two gold medals from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association, and he was twice named a Michigan Notable Book author by the Library of Michigan. Lystra has received creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. He and his wife divide their time between a farm in northern Michigan and a small town on the ocean side of Florida.
Donald Lystra Interview
On your nightstand now: at the top of a high stack is Dear Life by Alice Munro
Favorite book when you were a child: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Your top five authors: Richard Ford, Marilynne Robinson, early Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Ross MacDonald
Book you’ve faked reading: Mrs. Dolloway by Virginia Wolfe. (Ashamed to say I couldn’t make it past the first page.)
Book you’re an evangelist for: The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
Book you’ve bought for the cover: The Goodbye Look by Ross MacDonald
Book you hid from your parents: The Story of O
Book that changed your life: Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Favorite line from a book: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains,” from A Farewell to Arms
Five books you’ll never part with: The Sportswriter, Homemaking, The Sun Also Rises, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Walden
Book you most want to read again for the first time: Grapes of Wrath
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